Lonewolf 50Not suggesting that the Melville Island accident was related to AssymVR, however many others have been, ever since the first deadly MV22 night-time accident at Marana Arizona in APRIL 2000 that killed 19 Marines. No 2 in that flight of four V22's also had a very hard landing with minor injuries (it had extricated itself from the incipient condition). It's all in Wikipedia (which also excises the term "asymmVR"). Vortex ring was admitted but the AsymmVR term never passed the lips or pens of the investigators. It was quite a denial IMHO. Gen McCorkle was the chief advocate of the MV22 at that time. Or maybe it was just a prudent suppression of an off-putting fact for an airplane that the Corps had committed to. Howsoever, they began training against it by severely limiting the flight regime for approach descent rates (the stable approach criteria were quite strict - but would it work in combat scenarios?). The next fatal V22 crash was 18 months later at Jacksonville NC. Readers of Air Safety Week at the time (post Marana) queried why my proposed solution shouldn't be implemented. It comes down to similar prevailing commercial circumstances as underlied the 737Max MCAS glitch. Boeing was aware of the issue, but didn't want to surface it... for well-known reasons. In hindsight, that prevarication proved to be a bad decision. That V22 panic button suggested later (in the final pages of that ongoing Angelfire link above) would have been a life-saver... even for instantly extricating from deadly dust-storms... and one engine-out recovery fiascos.
In a career that stretched from my mid-teens to fulltime reservist QFI training of AFTS grads up to Wings standard in my mid-60's, I always took a very pessimistic approach to accident potentials and the unexpected gotchas that can getcha. However, as time went on, I grew to realize that you cannot avoid the odd situation that appears from nowhere. I flew my first 2 engine approach in a 4 engine airplane as a 19 year old with few hours on type, but luckily the two outed engines were on opposite sides. Yet this was complicated by the one good recip backfiring badly as the copilot hadn't done his RH seat conversion yet and failed to adjust the cowl flaps for climb power. ATC was unhelpful with a "Runway occupied, go round" - but I didn't comply. You just don't in those circumstances, nor do you argue the toss. We squeezed it in. If you had to conceive a worst nightmare situation for a Huey pilot, it would be a tail-rotor drive-shaft failure in a high hover with two on their way down on the hoist. Just when do you chop their cable? We finessed it and got out a Mayday before we hit - and they flew the airplane out the next day. In a turboprop trainer, what's the worst that could ever happen to you? Ejection through a bird-toughened non-jettisonable LDC-covered canopy. The first chap to try that ejection way out, a few months earlier, lost both his femoral arteries and drowned in the North Sea. What's the 2nd worst scenario? Losing a prop-seal and having the entire canopy covered with a thickening coating of non-opaque oil. That was a challenging introduction to the virtues of lateral thinking - with the lateral being an extreme oil-thinning side-slip. It was runway insightful, even if a bit one-sided. What do you do when you lower a crewman into a triple-canopy jungle after an O-2 Push-pull FAC has been shot down and he wanders off to the wreck to look for survivors...without a radio. The air was quite full of Willie-Pete smoke from the FAC's underwing target-marking rocket armament. He didn't find any survivors but neither could he locate where he'd tied off his strop. He could hear us above, but that wasn't much help due all that thick foliage and smoke. After a very long time in the hover, during which the copilot backed the tail into tree foliage, it gradually became a real existential moral quandary. How could you ever explain or justify leaving him there? Do you fire a Verey cartridge into the foliage beneath? Lots of scope for lateral thinking. Luckily the 20 minute fuel light illuminated just after we got him back onboard. I took the USAF body recovery team out the next day after the area was secured by a LRRP 10man fighting patrol, and made sure that they all had radios and flare-pistols. After-thoughts are forever destined to be just that. What do you do when your compass fails during a long-range drop-tanked navex in the middle of a featureless Saudi desert? The StrikeMaster (like all other aircraft) has an E2A wet compass, but if it's quite turbulent at all levels and the weather is mucky, it's next to useless and you are quite loathe to climb into the thick clouds and hope for later radar assistance/recovery. That may have ultimately and potentially been a silken terminal letdown. Luckily my Saudi student's family lived in a desert encampment, he often drove his 4WD out there and he was quite happy at low-level. He could identify prominent sand-dune ridges by their mutual orientation, even with the wind whipping up a sandy poor visibility. So I let him have his head for a suggested way back. It was ridgy-didge perfect, the way he found his way home. Tap-tap.
The moral of this long-winded story is that "wise after the event" is always destined to be disappointing. If an airplane or system has a known flaw, then rather than living with it, you should fix it. Before I became a Squadron Safety Officer, I answered the annual questionnaire on "what and where" the next squadron accident would happen. I suggested "having the Duty pilot solo ferry aircraft just freshly out of the maintenance hangar into a nearby narrow PSP revetment". That occurred, as predicted, the following week. As it happened, without a word of a lie, that Duty Pilot's name was Ono. Not his fault really as the gunship version of a HUEY was necessarily that much wider. The CO had a fit ... but Ono hadn't.